Apps to make keeping up with soccer easier

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Rory Smith, chief soccer correspondent for The Times, who is based in Manchester, England, discussed the tech he’s using.

As a soccer reporter, you must be savvy about video-streaming apps and gear like antennas. What are your favourite tools for staying on the ball, so to speak?
The ones I use the most are Virgin Anywhere and Sky Sports Mobile TV, the two official apps from the two major cable networks in the UK. Sky holds the rights to most Premier League games; subscribing to Virgin means I can watch the rest of the major European leagues, too.

I have friends, more technologically minded than me, who prefer streaming matches through a Kodi box (a set-top device that runs an open-source media app that can be used to stream pirated content, including illegal sports streams). I can see why they’re tempted: The cost of subscriptions is considerable. I can justify it — to my wife, and to myself — as a professional necessity, but many can’t.

It is worthwhile only because of the apps, though: I use them not only when I travel, but increasingly often at home, too. My wife, Kate, would rightly regard herself as something of a soccer (well, a soccer journalism) widow; being able to watch a game on an iPad while she reads or watches something else has soothed a regular source of low-key domestic disharmony.

What do you like about the tools, and what could be better?
The Virgin app, certainly, needs work to iron out various bugs. In the early days of streaming — before these apps were commonplace — I’d quite often have to find matches on websites of dubious provenance and even more uncertain reliability. It was always kind of a crapshoot as to how much of the game you’d actually see in between all of the buffering and pop-ups and losses of connection.

Virgin has not yet quite escaped at least two of those problems; Sky is better, but not perfect. I would imagine that’s a problem that applies to whatever the United States equivalents of those apps are, too.

Do you think it’s feasible for avid sports fans to cut the cable cord, or is cable still the way to go?
It’s feasible, but it depends on how avid you are and how patient you are prepared to be. I know Kodi and its equivalents are becoming ever more popular, and there are plenty of people I know who consume as much soccer as they want without paying very much, if anything at all, for the privilege.

I can’t condone doing things that aren’t entirely legal, of course, but at the same time, the cost of watching sport is rising all the time, and if there comes a point where that is out of reach for a substantial number of people, you almost have to accept that they will try to find ways around it.

That said, the Premier League — like the NFL and others — are doing all they can to combat streaming, so it remains, by all accounts, somewhat time-consuming and not entirely reliable. It is definitely easier to have cable, but I’m not sure, especially to a younger, digital-native generation, that it is still an absolute necessity.